And there it was. The moment. The kind of moment that, as a parent, you both long for and fear at the same time. But as an Uncle, you get utterly blindsided by its very existence. One second I'm sucking down a hot dog twice as long as my large intestine, the next I'm staring down a once in a lifetime opportunity to validate this boy's very existence.
Read MoreHere is a thing that always bugged me as an Atheist and hasn't changed since I crossed over to the La La Land of Christian Lemmingism. I seem to remember getting a lot of crap over the notion that, as an Atheist, I believed this one life was all I had. "Isn't it sad or depressing to think that when you die you simply cease to exist?" my well-meaning Christian friends would query.
It always seemed obvious to me then, and still does now, that nothing was better than Hell. Wait, that didn't come out right. What I mean is that ceasing to exist is preferred to spending an eternity in a place like Hell. It is more sad and depressing to me that people who spent an inordinate amount of time doing good on this earth would go to Hell for an eternity than that all people would have one, short, finite life. I mean really. Which presents the greater tragedy?
Another thing I would hear along the same lines is, "If this life is all you have then where is your incentive to be good? Wouldn't you be motivated to lie and exploit and deceive and cheat since you have just this one life to seek pleasure and no fear of eternal consequences?"
The logic goes, since Atheists don't know God, the source of all goodness, how could they be anything but powerless to chase after both the carnal and the diabolical sins? They can't help it, right?
No.
Atheists are not so shallow and immoral as you might expect. They believe in love and justice and honor and respect and the sanctity of marriage. They die for our country, uphold our laws, research our medical treatments, and educate our children. When you believe that you only have one, finite life... your motivation is to seek pleasure to be sure. But if the good things in life really are good, and the bad things really are bad, what greater pleasure could there be than spending a single, finite life pursuing the joy and satisfaction that can only be achieved by the higher virtues?
Besides, I think it is best that we, as Christians, not be too quick to pull out our moral report card to compare it against others. I'm not convinced I'd be too keen on the results, personally.
My formative middle and junior high school years were woven together against the backdrop of several USAF communities in the United Kingdom. Quite simply, I loved it there. I missed it after we left, but it wasn't all moon pies and snickerdoodles.
Occasionally the British youth would pass the time by shouting insults out of cars as they passed. Or spray painting "YANKS GO HOME!" on the sides of our houses. Or throwing pebbles at our windows at night and then calling us wankers as they ran off into the dark. I remember loving it there, but it was not my home. It was impossible not to notice a cultural us-versus-them undercurrent. I was young, but I still remember missing my country, my America.
She and I were reunited again in 1990, at the start of my sophomore year of high school. My Dad received his relocations orders and our new home would be in South Georgia. I didn't realize it at the time but I was about to move from one foreign country to another. I had constructed an America in my mind that the real America had no inclination of honoring. This new America, this real America, was going to be unsophisticated, Christian, and racist.
My new town had two public schools. The inner city crowd went to one. The country folk went to the other. The school I attended was approximately 80% black. In this environment white kids did not verbally or physically assault black kids. It was the other way around. For the most part I stayed out of trouble, but it did give me a front row seat to some of America's more pronounced blemishes.
Our school had a giant white dome over the gymnasium which was prevalent regardless of where you stood outside. One morning, as I approached the school, I realized that someone had vandalized this dome the preceding night. Someone with very poor orthography and/or a severe falling out with Nigerians. In large black letters I read, "F*CK ALL NIGERS."
I remember stopping, staring, and then thinking, "This is not my America."
The real America, it would seem, had its own us-versus-them undercurrent. My wife, who went to the country school, has told me similar stories. She recalls one incident where a white girl was harassed in the hallway by a couple of black guys. The next day her father was arrested for patrolling the same halls, during the same time, with his shotgun. Spewing and shouting that he was going to "Kill him some niggers." She also recalls, as if perfectly scripted from a movie, a high school football game where a cross, which had been secretly positioned outside the stadium in a field past one of the goal posts, was set ablaze to the surprise of the students, faculty, and spectators.
I think most of us can agree that today's presidential inauguration shouldn't be a big deal. Our new president went to Columbia and Harvard. He was an attorney, a constitutional law professor and a U.S. senator. It shouldn't be a big deal that this man was elected president.
But it is.
It is because he is black. Because of the sorts of things I know to have happened in the early 1990s, when President-elect Obama was 29 years old and graduating from Harvard. It doesn't seem that far away to me, really. The teenagers who grew up with me in these environments are, naturally, my age, in their early thirties. These are voters. And maybe it is because of, or in spite of, these environments that today we swear in the first black president of our country.
I didn't vote for President-elect Obama and neither did I vote against him. I fully intend on holding him accountable for the content of his character over the color of his skin, like I have with President's past. But as I think back now on the day of the inauguration, I can not help but appreciate my lady, America, for the woman she is becoming right before my eyes.
UPDATE 2/1/2010: I chose to censor my own post and remove the expletives.